Why wasn’t I taught how to ask questions? This was the first research question I asked during my second 701 meeting (a popular subject for this week’s blog). How can I help my students ask questions? What are those magical questions that will produce more questions? Linkon’s article and inquiry-project really exposes how questions are the center of any literature classroom and, in connection with Scholes, the importance of producing questions in our students, rather than only providing them.
For too much of my education I fell into the novice traps Linkon discusses: I provided (and married ‘til death) conclusions. If a teacher asked a question then they expected a concrete, correct answer, right? Why else would they ask? So, my role as a student was to provide answers and their role as teacher was to provide questions. Why didn’t I further question their actual motives for questioning? My knee-jerk cultural assumption, as we discussed in class, lead me no further than a shallow response based only on my narrow comprehension of the text I read once. Right on to Linkon for appreciating the understanding found through re-reading texts and structuring assignments to foster recursive readings.
My writing assignments always required answering the questions of specific prompts, but again those questions were provided by my teachers: “Did Christopher Newman’s character change throughout James’ The American?” I remember experiencing Linkon’s “excitement of scholarly work,” (253), while composing this final paper and finally came to my unsatisfying “defendable conclusion,” (270). Unsatisfying because I didn’t ask the question? Maybe. Unsatisfying because I honestly believed that I was finished and had discovered the only correct answer? Definitely. Later I reread The American as an out-of-class activity and although I was pleasantly surprised that I still found joy in asking the question of Christopher Newman’s character arch and re-examining the textual evidence. The question no longer produced a clear-cut yes or no, but developed into more questions. How did I learn to ask these questions when inquiry was a skill I was never explicitly taught? Good question.
I never remember any teacher holding a class discussion on how to ask questions or what kind of questions to ask. Somewhere in the character arch of Faye I came to a different understanding of why we ask questions and the dynamic aspects of answers.
All of literature instruction requires questions. Even this blog feeds on questions: “formulate an insightful question or two about the reading and then attempt to answer your own questions.” What questions produce open and active inquiry? How do you ask those perfect questions to facilitate multiple interpretations? I’ll start with Linkon’s in-class activities for framing different kinds of questions and a collaborative class list (262), but I think this is one of the research questions I’ll continue asking and testing hypothesizes for my entire teaching career.
I completely agree that students are rarely taught how to ask questions. Up until my 300-400 level courses in ungrad, I was always given a writing prompt for all writing assignments. I remember how uncomfortable I was the first time that I was asked to write a research paper without a prompt. Not only do these writing prompts prevent students from learning how to ask their own questions, but they also teach students that there will always be a clear answer.
This issue of never learning how to ask productive (or as Linkon calls them, “generative”) questions is emerging as a dominant theme this week. We should spend some time in class figuring out some strategies for this: not how to ask generative questions, but how to teach students to ask generative questions.